Evaluation question 4Emily Hemmings

PlanningWhen researching into our theme of dystopia I looked at many different websites to increase my knowledge before creating my trailer. When researching into dystopia I used many websites such as British film institute; this website was very useful as it gives facts and information about the modern day film industry as well as statistics and reports.Internet Movie Database (IMDB) was also very useful as it made it very easy to research dystopia films and the themes that ran through out them such as 28 days later and I Am Legend. The Internet Movie Database website, also proved beneficial when it came to seeing how the film was marketed and released. I also used the Launching Films website when researching when our film should be released as this website is an industry website and has film release dates on record. With this information we could release our film when there were no other Dystopia films being released. This also showed me the peak times when releasing film which was June-September when students and children were released for summer term. There was also many articles I read when researching the dystopia themes which was also appropriate when researching and planning into my final trailer of Lights Out.The Articles: •http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Dystopia.aspx•http://www.explore-science-fiction-movies.com/dystopian-society.html#axzz2suUVs7L0 •http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/dystopian-films

xWhen creating a poster and front magazine cover to promote our film we needed to research into the different formats and advertisement that featured onto both of these.Many of the popular film magazines have official websites which was effective when researching into the different magazine covers. This included Little White Lies Magazine, Total Film Magazine and Empire Magazine.

When researching into these magazines I found the website ‘national readership survey’ which showed me the amount of females and males that read each magazine and the age range that are also subscribed to each individual magazine. This allowed me to see how big of a readership both Empire and Little White Lies magazine had and it helped me make a decision about which one to promote our film inwhich was White Little Lies.

•Empire Magazine: http://www.empireonline.com •Little White Lies Magazine: http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk •Total Film Magazine: http://www.totalfilm.com •National Readership Survey: http://www.nrs.co.uk/choose-trends/

When researching into Posters appropriate for the film I used google to research Dystopia films and their posters. This showed me the different things that needed to be featured onto this such as: The certificate, release date, actors and web 2.0 platforms that are linked with Lights Out.Also for my poster I used the site ‘Movie Poster DB’ as it has lots of different posters for lots of different films. It had poster’s of the films that I was researching of a dystopia theme and gave me all the posters that I needed to look at so I could get my research done on how to construct our poster.

xWhen it came to comparing and analysing film trailers of a Dystopia theme YouTube was by far the most useful website using the advantage of watching different dystopia trailers for free. YouTube is also vital for the marketing process on the web 2.0 platform as it a very popular website with a wide range of audience which is crucial when advertising a film.YouTube is easy and very accessible when researching dystopia into the YouTube engine 134,000 videos are found.

Another useful website for researching how films were marketed was Box Office Mojo as it had all the statistics about how much films cost to produce and how much their box office takings were. This also showed me which films were more successful than others. This would be very useful when releasing our dystopia trailer and film out of ‘’Lights out.’’

Trailers I analysed on YouTubeWhen looking at dystopia themed films on YouTube I evaluated different dystopia trailers to gain full knowledge when creating my trailer of Lights Out.The trailer I evaluated was: 28 days later, a typical dystopia film. This was 1 film out of 4 that I evaluated which is placed on my blog.

Here is the trailer that I used from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEkJAaGhJhQ

28 days laterAfter watching the YouTube trailer I evaluated each shot within the first 2 minutes of the trailer.Example:

In this shot we see different days that have taken place throughout the film. For example this gives an eerie feeling as the words appear onto the screen with a flash and almost fades away into the darkness. I like this as it signifies many things for example hidden things and objects that may take place into the rest of the film. The font is also very clear and easy to read against the black background, but in my opinion it goes a little too fast for the reader to read in time.

In the next shot we see a massive explosion, this brings an excitement to the audience watching with suspicion as to how it had occurred.The lighting in this is critical as they have to make sure the whole city lights are darkened so the full attention is on to the explosion that is happening in such a short clip in the trailer clip.

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I also wrote notes in my folder when researching what aspects are featured in a dystopia film, examples of these are shown below:

Presentations

When presenting my information and evaluations I used Microsoft Office PowerPoint. I used PowerPoint as it is easy to use and produce adding tables, images and clear titles to back my ideas up with different layouts and designs to make it look visually appealing instead of a word document. I could also simply add links to my information placed on the presentations which would allow people to directly to connect to the websites that I have used. This programme is designed to help users present there work in an interesting and attractive way and they have helped me achieve great presentations with the use of images and large titles.For example I presented my evaluation question 1,2 and 4 on a PowerPoint presentation.

I have also used Timetoast at the beginning of the task to show my shooting schedules which is easily visible with a professional look which can be seen on my blog.

Timetoast: http://www.timetoast.com/

Quack BlogThroughout the process of creating my trailer ‘lights out’ and creating the advertisement, I have been updating my work that has helped me along the way onto a diary-like blog. It became very handy when looking back to develop original ideas further and remembering specific features. This also showed my participation in the group and to describe the editing, filming, planning and research into my words.

The blog also connected the four members of my group when comparing blogs and communicating on what to do next to avoid overlapping and to also give credit when needed. The Quack blog was easy and effective when adding YouTube clips and links to where simple dystopia themes linked in with the research we had done.For example this is me communicating with a member of my group:

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An example of me using the blog also allowed me to communicate with my teacher as he would read the presentations and information to give me constructive criticism allowing me to improve my work and gain a higher grade like the picture below:

Post ProductionTo edit our film trailer we used an Apple Mac computer and the Adobe Premiere Pro programme. This programme allowed us to arrange the clips into the right order using a colour code of traffic lights, using colour correction to make our trailer more organised and to also: add titles, add music and sound effects to give our trailer a more professional look. We used this programme to edit our entire trailer and it allowed us to do complicated editing as a group such as, reverse and speed up. As we used a large amount of dark lighting footage we were able to lighten up the image so that it appeared visible to the audience allowing them to see the whole shot clearly. We received the fonts we used from a site called Dafont and from Premiere itself. We thought that some of the fonts from Dafont were superior to those of Premiere so we downloaded them for free as we thought they linked in more with our dystopia theme and black background.

When it came to producing our film poster and magazine cover we used the Adobe Photoshop programme. This allowed us to use the Little White Lies cover template and modify it until it became an entirely new issue of the magazine completely designed, by the group which linked with our trailer Lights out with pictures of the characters and broken light bulbs linked with the film itself. When using Photoshop we were able to use different layers which is used on the poster to make the sure the title stands out on top of the rest. To create the Magazine Cover we had to use the ‘magnetic Lasso’ tool to cut out the main image, place the masthead layer behind the main image, use the ‘Hue/Saturation’ tool to enable us to desaturation the background and the add the cover lines using the ‘Type’ tool to add the font clearly of ‘’Lights Out.’’

ProductionI used my iPhone camera to take pictures of areas that we were going to film and used the pictures in a recce as well as using it in our research. I also used the camera to take pictures of the characters in the trailer so that we could make our magazine covers and posters. We took many different shots so that we had a variety of shots to chose from preparing before filming

When it came to filming we were very fortunate to use the college equipment with a wide range of technology to make a more realistic feel to the trailer. When filming we used a Canon 550D DSLR camera with a 35mm lense, as well as a 50mm lense. As the 50mm lense was unable to zoom we used the 35mm lense which was able to create a more professional look as we were able to zoom into certain features that were linked into our theme of dystopia e.g. the phone box numbers as the actress dialled with a high quality image we found this very effective when filming the trailer of Lights Out.

We also used other equipment such as: camera slide, tripod, modisteady and a microphone. The microphone enabled the actors to talk and be heard to the audience with the fear in their voices clearly.

As our trailer is based on real life people in a real life situation we didn’t use many of this equipment as we wanted to create a hand held look with a shaky effect to make it seem more realistic. When we recorded the voice over we used a voice recorder and microphone to try and get a clear voice over sound of the idea’s and opinions onto our trailer that we had used. I think the voice over is very clear.

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Example of how we changed the editing while using the same Canon 550D DSLR is shown below:

As you can see in this picture taken from our trailer, the image is clear. We used a simple close up shot to show the actor dialling a number on the phone box. The light used in this shot is from a torch creating an eerie feeling to the audience watching, there was no editing of the image here.

However although using the same camera the image here looks completely different from the other.We created this by adding the record button and brackets by creating the shapes in a text then simply overlaying them over the images which we wanted to show were hand held.We also created a static noise by creating a loud noise and overlaying on top of the images to give it a blurry feel.

SoundAs I mentioned previously we used a voice recording kit and a microphone to record the voice over for our trailer Lights out which we used as non-diegetic dialogue to describe the shots we used and as to why.While researching the soundtrack to our trailer we used SoundCloud with original covers of large range of popular songs.We looked at this website as they have libraries of copyright free music; this means it is music we can use and not be taken to court or have our trailer taken down because of copyright issues although as a group we thought it was appropriate to ask the band if we could use the song and they happily agreed on the condition that we mentioned them some how.

As well as the cover of ‘Muse –Follow me’ sang by PinkEgoBand we also used some sound effects in our trailer that we found on the college’s computer database. This allowed us to give our trailer another dimension as we could add the buzzing of the light bulb with the eerier track in the background all at once.The sound effects were called: •Thunder dreams •Steel rods •Storm Front•Controlled chaos

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This is an example the sound on top of the image. Here we used ‘Thunder Dreams’ to make the audience aware that this is a dystopian film as the sound seems unhuman like and scary, giving subtle hints to the audience. We got the ‘Thunder Dreams’ sound effect from the college data base and thought it would fit perfectly with the slow beat pace of ‘Steel Rods’ in the background.

Before editing the trailer we created over voice which would be placed on top of the image o as the audience reads the quote that is linked with light. We pre-recorded the 999 call in the colleges studio room beforehand and put an echo effect on the scream to also link with our dystopia theme of something unnatural.

Evaluation QuestionsI used different presentation websites and programmes during the evaluation stage. I mainly used YouTube and PowerPoint as they are easy to use and produce a good quality presentation. Both presentation platforms allow a variety of layouts and designs that can make your work both informative and attractive to an audience. I originally planned on only using PowerPoint but it became apparent that my evaluation presentation may come across as boring when explaining and developing my ideas so as a group we decided on using a YouTube video on evaluation question one.

For evaluation question 1 everyone in the group recorded themselves discussing different aspects of the trailer and this was edited over the top of the trailer. This makes for a much more interesting presentation than just reading about what we did as we are discussing what we did through out the YouTube video.

YouTube was a valuable website for this task, not only for the researching trailers but for a platform that we could upload our rough cuts, behind the scenes footage and final trailer on. All of our videos can be found on the YouTube channel A2MediaVarndean. YouTube was also helpful when researching dystopia film trailers.

Communication and google mailOver this entire task I have been using Google, not only as a search engine but as a way of communicating to the other members of the group by using google mail. Using Gmail is the easiest way of sending files to each other and asking each other about certain tasks and the progress we were at, helping each other along the way. We could have used Facebook as a way of communicating but not all the members had an active account which made it much harder. I have also used Google images throughout this task to be able to display all of the products and ideas I have talked about and to also make sure it looks visually appealing.

We also used our mobile phones to communicate when meeting up the film the trailer by using frequent texts. This was an easy way to communicate to one another easily.